[bbromhead]

This won't be a popular comment amongst my fellow Australians, but some of these points in the post don't ring true to me.

Being a startup in Australia is hard, but being a startup is hard anywhere. I think there is a certain mentality amongst Australian startups that the US is the land of milk and honey for startups and Australia sucks. There is a certain element of truth in that, but its not as bad as some of the posts to HN make it out to be.

First Tax Breaks: The R&D tax incentive is amazing (http://www.ausindustry.gov.au/programs/innovation-rd/RD-TaxI...). We have recovered around 40% of our seed funding as a tax refund from the ATO. If you do something slightly innovative and can prove that you do some testing, you qualify. This tax incentive has directly allowed us to put on another developer.

GST: Yup GST is a pain but at least its uniformly applied to the whole country. The US you have to apply it on a state by state basis (depending on where you are located etc and the nature of the good/service you provide). Other countries have a consumption tax. Seriously meeting your tax obligations is a requirement of doing business anywhere, its not that hard to do: if(countryCode == "AU") {//apply GST... }.

Venture Capital: Nothing can compare to Silicon Valley in terms of money available for the tech space, but at the same time Australian VCs are often happy with a 10x exit as opposed to pushing you to be either a $1 billion company or go bust. The choice of where you raise will be a personal choice more likely influenced about who you know. Remember the higher the valuation you get, the bigger the exit you need to make.

Australia being expensive: Sure you pay a little bit more for your mac book pro, but the guy using it will be seriously cheaper than someone in the valley. You think Australia is competitive for developers who could get a cushy contracting rate. Try competing with facebook, google etc for the top talent.

Internet: Ok the current government hates in the NBN, it sucks, I love fast broadband as much as the next person, but unless your startup is about delivering high bandwidth content to Australians who cares? Your servers are going to be sitting on AWS in US_EAST anyway.

Mind you having said that I do agree with some points. Employee Share Schemes are a pain in the arse and getting a good payment provider is tough. Seriously spend the cash to get a Delaware C-Corp and open a US bank account... this will make your life so much easier. Even Braintree Australia is a shadow of using Braintree from the US.

[grecy]

I'm an Australian that left 8 years ago, and have been living and working in the US and Canada ever since.

I agree with you 100%.

Australia being expensive: Anyone that says that needs to wake up to how lucky they are to live in "the lucky country". After living a few years in America (and to a lesser extent Canada) I'm more than happy to pay extra for "stuff", given life is so, so much better. Heath Care, Education, decent infrastructure, paid vacation, sick and maternity leave, just to name a few. Also consider someone working minimum wage in the US ($7.25/hr) has to work ~206 hours to get that $1500USD MacBookPro. In Australia, someone on minimum wage ($16.37/hr) has to work ~113 hours for the same $1849AUD MacBookPro. Obviously minimum wage earners are not buying MacBookPros, but given that wages scale similarly, you see living/working Australia is actually better than living/working in the US.

Timezones: Wait, it's a complaint that the world has timezones now? Give me a break!

Foreign Investors want a global vision: The OP of the article is upset that foreign investors want to get a boat-load of money back on their money by reaching as many customers as possible? Does this person not understand how investors think?

In short, cry me a river. I challenge any Australian who disagrees with me to go and live in the US for a few years, then see what you have to complain about.

[vacri]

The timezone issue is significant if you need to offer realtime support as part of your product, and the majority of your clients aren't near where you are.

[grecy]

Yes, but that's like complaining you have to spend time brushing your teeth in the morning, or take time out to feed yourself the calories you need to live.

There is nothing you can do to change it, so if you really, really don't like it, move someplace it's not an issue.

It's part of life, stop complaining about it, and get on with it.

[semerda]

West and East coast in the US are 3 hours apart (timezone - ta-da!). Same issue with timezones applies even in the USA. Realtime support is hard to do anywhere in the world. What happens when the operator is overloaded with too many requests. There are many ways to make this scale and work even across timezones and languages.

[vacri]

Come on guys, give me some credit. We're having problems with internal processes right now because our offices are split between Melbourne and San Francisco, and there's only 2 hours in the regular working day of overlap. Being a couple of hours out is nothing compared to being almost the entire working day out.

The more your support has to do shift work, the harder it is to get and vet support, train them properly, and the more expensive they are to pay. The more they're awake during normal sleeping hours, the lower the quality of support - and I say this having spent two years doing support for in-timezone sleep medicine equipment. The article also states other problems with response lag and low efficiency, which is what happens if you can't adjust your work day (and if you do, then you're out of sync with local services).

The kind of condescending 'get over it' comment from grecy is utterly beside the point - regardless of whether you deal with it well or not, out-of-timezone sync support is more difficult to do, and that is something worth mentioning in a list of hurdles an Australian startup might face.

[grecy]

> The kind of condescending 'get over it' comment from grecy is utterly beside the point - regardless of whether you deal with it well or not, out-of-timezone sync support is more difficult to do, and that is something worth mentioning in a list of hurdles an Australian startup might face.

You know, Australians are very well known internationally being being complaining so-and-sos.

I can't believe a thinking person would actually complain that Australia is in vastly different time zone. Next you'll be complaining it's too hot, then that it's to sparsely populated (oh, you already are). It never ends with you, does it?

[vacri]

?

You're doing some pretty massive projection there. I said that the timezone increases support costs if you're not where your market is, and it's worth putting on a list of hurdles for startups. I didn't complain about the timezone, just mentioned that it's not the trivial issue you painted it as. It's also winter here in Melbourne, where it gets cold enough that I've heard both Scots and Canadians bitch about how stupidly cold it is here (because we don't insulate our buildings properly), and when summer rolls around, I love the heat and 40+ degree days. And when it comes to 'sparsely populated', I've argued several times here on HN that Australia is one of the most urbanised large countries in the world - despite the outback image we promote, far more of us live in the cities and we have a very centralised population.

So not only are your complaints wrong about me, they're the diametric opposite of who I am and what I say. It's fine if you don't like the country and want to live somewhere else, but don't just make shit up about your former fellow citizens in order to justify your movement to yourself.

[crdb]

To nitpick:

- Australia is only competitive against the Valley, but that's like saying New York super premium real estate is cheap because those penthouses go for 30m vs London's 100m. We hire globally with half the team being remote, and Aussies are the most expensive per "unit talent" of our applicants, followed by Sweden (which is tax-expensive). Americans are really cheap once you get them out of the Valley - on par with Asia despite the extra tax - because cost of living in places like LA's suburbs or Pittsburgh is low.

- there's AWS in Sydney and Singapore now.

[bbromhead]

By the same logic (and our hiring experiences), Australians are also cheap outside of Sydney and Melbourne.

[crdb]

Really? Our applicants came from Perth, Brissy and even Tasmania as well. In fact, the Sydney ones were cheaper. But we target people with around 5-10 years experience. I would say if x is the market value of a Singaporean developer, Australia is around 3x, the US 0.8x but this is hypothetical since we have yet to hire a Singaporean into the Haskell team (the language is pretty much unknown here).

I was looking at real estate in various Australian cities. There's a 3 bedroom house 1km from Bankstown station (not as bad as it used to be but still, no Kirribilli) that went for 750k AUD 2 months ago - imagine what that would buy in most US cities! Even moving to the suburbs isn't an option anymore.

[jbarham]

> Even moving to the suburbs isn't an option anymore.

Sure it is. Just rent instead of buying. I pay less to rent a 3 bedroom house in Melbourne's inner suburbs than I did for a 3 bedroom unit in Irvine, CA. Granted buying a house in Australia is very expensive, but Aussies will learn soon enough the folly of not heeding the lessons of the property bubbles in the US, Ireland, Spain etc...

[crdb]

Oh, on that I agree, but it's hard to fight with an ingrained culture of ownership ("rent is dead money!") and cheap credit, and the income/price ratios have been consistent at least since the 80s according to people who bought back then (just like house prices in the US kept going up from WWII to 2007). Australian real estate, unlike much of the US, is also very desirable to a lot of foreigners, and all the government needs to do is lift restrictions on foreign ownership to keep the market afloat a few more years. Look at how central London prices have shot up with the influx of money from as far as Moscow or Qatar...

[crdoconnor]

>we have yet to hire a Singaporean into the Haskell team (the language is pretty much unknown here).

There's a good chance that if I can recognize your company based on this sentence alone (and I can), it's not a very transferable skill.

[crdb]

Well, there's at least two of us (at least publicly) since last year :P

[kamaal]

>>I think there is a certain mentality amongst Australian startups that the US is the land of milk and honey for startups and Australia sucks.

This is true for many other parts of the world too. In my country its a big craze among young people to move to the US ASAP(I'm from India).

Unrealistic expectations, overall frustration with the government, corruption, bureaucracy, and infrastructure problems padded with heavy watching of Hollywood movies on HBO- transports people into a scheme of thinking that nothing is or will be ever wrong with US.

Only recently I heard two people talking while traveling back in the office cab, as to how all their problems would magically disappear if they immigrate to the US.

People seem to think that no one is poor in America, and that all Americans live in posh homes and drive expensive cars. And once you enter the US, all your troubles shall come to an end.

But people here don't have a very high opinion about the overall social and cultural aspects of the American society.

[Omniusaspirer]

>People seem to think that no one is poor in America, and that all Americans live in posh homes and drive expensive cars. And once you enter the US, all your troubles shall come to an end.

Well, to be fair if those countrymen are solid programmers that image of the US is pretty true. Solid coders are in huge demand and you certainly won't be poor if you apply yourself in that field. As to the social/cultural aspects, it's worth mentioning that the culture changes massively depending on where you're physically located in the country.

I don't mean to say everything is perfect here, but it's not the den of poverty and violence that a lot of media outlets try to make it out to be. Like everywhere else, there's good,bad, and everything in between.